Digital Life »Tips, tricks, and advice
Mashups, widgets and your web presence
beingzoe over 1 year ago | 2 responses    

By zoe somebody for Concepts Worldwide meeting news and know-how newsletter Conceptualize!. Also see Annette Greg’s SPOT at CoTradeCo to get a quick overview of how Concept’s Worldwide can help your business achieve measurable results at your next meeting or convention. Annette Gregg, CMP, CMM is Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Concepts Worldwide, a strategic meeting management and meeting planning company.

It was the 1990’s and along came the internet. It was the biggest communication revolution since the printing press. Anyone and everyone suddenly had an affordable means for publishing information about their interests, hobbies, or business as well as transacting business directly.

Fast forward ten years. You have a website. Everybody has a website. But they also have five different social networking profiles, three blogs, a mailing list, a quarterly newsletter, and your competition just put a new widget onto Google showcasing fun stories of customers using their products.

Many people think their web presence starts and stops at their website(s). The information, products, and services you offer on your website are obviously core to your web presence, but in reality your web presence is reflected by everything you and anyone else has posted on the internet about you, your business, and your products and services. The ease of publishing and interacting online redefined not only how a company represented itself but gave the rest of the world the same opportunity to speak on behalf of your company and in worst case scenarios, against your company. Technology such as message boards, forums, blogs, chat rooms, and instant messaging redefined the very concept of word-of-mouth marketing. Suddenly companies and mainstream news sources weren’t the only ones with a voice.

Many companies are still grappling with how to incorporate social software such as Facebook and LinkedIn into their web presence in a meaningful way. While social networking will continue to play a role in how companies, professionals, clients, and consumers meet and communicate there are some new buzz words on the internet that are going to become important.

Mashups

How people use the internet is changing, in large part due to advances in technology, development techniques, and the fact that broadband is as ubiquitous as the internet. The rise of web applications and services that started with web based email such as Hotmail or Gmail now extend to task tracking, advanced project management, and customer relations have begun to grow up. But this is only the beginning.

This new breed of web application often includes what is called an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows third parties to use and interact with the data from their site in new ways on another website application. In plain english, if website X has a database of WiFi locations with addresses and website Y has online mapping capabilities, both offering an API to access their data, website Z can come along using these API’s and create a whole new service that let’s users view on a map all the WiFi enabled locations in a given area.

This is the basis for the term mashup in modern programming.

Every time you use a store locator at a business site that shows you store locations and hours on a google map you are using a type of mashup. The company who is offering the store locator did not create the mapping software or the ability to put clickable pin points for all their locations. They are using some original code in conjunction with the mapping application to create a whole new interface.

In fact taking database information and search functionality from one site and “mashing” it with Google maps is the most popular and useful type of mashup existing today. HousingMaps shows you all the current housing listings on Craigslist through a Google Map. AuctionCloud has taken their eBay mashup to the next level by combining real estate listings at eBay with property estimates from Zillow. Without the API and the mashup, building companies with similar functionality would have required millions in programming and marketing to simply have the userbase necessary to make the functionality worthwhile.

Another great example of a mashup that will help you as you build your web presence through social software is PING.FM . PING offers a single interface to post to all of your social networking and blog sites at once. You probably already belong to at least two social networking or community forum sites. It can become a real nuisance to maintain and participate on all of them. This service uses the API from many different social networking sites to let you interact with all of them.

Where PING.FM uses the mashup concept to help you maintain your web presence in the blogosphere and social networks, Yahoo Pipes or the Google Mashup Editor (GME) are giving whole new ways to keep up with what other people are publishing. Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashup Editor are what is called a feed aggregator mashup. Nearly every website offers some kind of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed that you can add to a news reader to have information sent to you instead of having to visit countless websites. Pipes and GME give people the ability to not simply subscribe to multiple feeds but filter them into one cohesive stream of information like performing a targeted search every time you open your reader.

The concept of the mashup can be overwhelming at first and even counter-intuitive if you are still viewing the internet as a collection of webpages that are little more than interactive brochures. Most companies struggle with how to monetize a website much less sharing information and functionality from their business for others to use and present. But today’s internet user is growing accustomed to accessing their data, not just from “anywhere”, by in “any way” they choose. Mashup websites and applications make this possible, but they are also forcing businesses to reevaluate what information and services they are offering and how visitors will be accessing it.

How the mashup becomes a widget becomes a web application becomes a mashup

The type of technology being developed for Yahoo Pipes, Google Mashup Editor, and others goes one step further by allowing people to create actual mini-applications using the information, resources, and functionality of any web application with an API or a feed. This kind of application is often referred to as a widget.

A widget is a small application or snippet of information that gets its information and functionality from another source. If you have a custom Google home page you’ve seen and used widgets. A widget might simply include content from a website, or it might check your mail, or show the latest web site statistics, let you post to Twitter, or anything you can imagine so long as it’s publicly available through a feed or API.

A widget, in modern programming and internet terms, brings everything we’ve discussed so far together and puts into bite-sized chunks that can be used by anyone to quickly access and utilize the information shared through mashups andpublished and shared via RSS. Again in plain english, a widget can be thought of as a few lines of code placed on a webpage or blog that then includes the functionality or information from another website or mashup allowing visitors to see and use that third party information “offsite”.

What this means is that you could build a widget that finds breaking news stories in your industry, blog postings about your company, and/or updates your personal todo list from your corporate project or customer management software. That’s right, you could build it. Mashup widget editors are appearing making it possible for the average person to create basic widgets they can use on their websites or blogs. Even better and more complex, you can make widgets and mashups out of existing mashups and widgets recombining information endlessly further taking advantage of the collective creativity.

Mashups, widgets, your web presence, and beyond

So how can you use mashups today for your existing business and further improve your web presence?

You can start by exploring what content is available in your industry and providing news and resources from the around the internet directly on your website. What information or resources are out there freely available to display on your site which adds that old fashioned “stickiness” to your site?

On the publishing side of widgets, if you have a newsletter or mailing list you publish to regularly, you could create slimmed down versions as widgets that people could include on their personalized Google home page, their various social networking sites, or their blog with tips and tricks, word or concept of the day factoids, or news headlines from your company and industry. If your company is regularly posting video and images to sites like YouTube, you can make a widget for the picture or video of the week. Where you were pushing content to your audience, your audience might decide they would like to share some of that advice and information with their site visitors for you on their websites.

The trick with mashups and widgets, like building a website, is identifying and creating interesting and useful content that stands well on its own. Mashups and widgets are the next stage of information sharing and interaction, but these new tools are only as useful as the information they are mashing up and providing. Just as people discovered posting ads and press releases on social networking sites was not very productive, creating mashups and widgets of random and loosely related content are probably not going to find a large audience either. But it is worth noting that when it comes to the finicky tastes of internt users and potentially viral media, it isn’t always obvious what constitutes interesting and useful information.

If your company is already building relationships, sharing useful information, and building quality relationships through existing social software, it is not a big step to start exploring how you can harness your companies vertical expertise and well developed web presence with the power of the mashup and widgets to supercharge your web presence and add value to your existing business products, services, and marketing. Think of the mashup as a new type of business partnership with far less commitment.

Where does it go from here?

The concepts of social software, mashups, and widgets as I’ve described here and exist today are where the internet was 10 years ago. At the time of this writing most mashups and widgets being released are purely entertainment giving us new ways to look at pictures, watch videos, or read interesting articles and factoids. But in some of the examples shared in this article we are beginning to see emerging possibilities that make the internet as we know it today appear to be a crude pile of random information.

As new interconnections of data and information from the millions of databases around the world are mashedup we are going to see disparate data turned into extremely valuable resources that we can only dream of today. There are hundreds if not thousands of publicly accessible databases of information available from government sources alone. What could be done by combining these different sources of publicly available information for business planning, development, and marketing purposes? What information and resources does your company offer that could be mashed up?

It is no longer simply a question of how to market to your customers. It is a question of what type of relationships, resources, and tools are your offering. Widgets and mashups extend the possibilities for those relationships and interactions far beyond a website or blog.

Today social software is part of that offering. Mashups and widgets are going to become a part of the modern web presence. How will you use new technologies and relationships to add value and grow your business?

Zoe somebody is an internet consultant and entrepeneur. He is co-founder of imotion design and CoTradeCo trading post & community, an agile company building its own brand of social networking and looking for some useful stuff to mash up.